Monday, August 17, 2009

Suggestions

I'm teaching a class for Home Family and Personal Enrichment night in a few weeks. My subject is how to tighten our purse strings. I've got several ideas brewing, but could use the expertise from several of your frugal people out there. Any tips on how to save money on things from groceries to clothing to well.. just about anything. Also if you have any inexpensive meal ideas, that would be great too!

3 comments:

Short of clipping and organizing a million coupons, my favorite money saving tip would be to never buy anything that's not on sale, and stock up when things are on sale. So when cereal is on sale for $1-$1.50 a box at Smith's (Kroger), I buy a bunch. Then I don't buy any cereal until the next similar sale. Same goes for apple juice, canned goods, pasta, etc. Stock up when stuff is on sale. Don't buy things that are not (Unless absolutely necessary) and price match at Walmart when the milk, eggs, butter, etc is on sale at a store that is inconveniently located for me. Hope that helps! Good luck with your class. I probably have more ideas if you want. Just send me an email or something. Oh, and prepaid cell minutes is a huge one for us. We have Google Voice for our home phone, so we use our cells only when absolutely necessary. I put $100 worth of minutes on it in November last year, and I haven't had to pay a penny more since. I'm just now getting low. So $100 for 9 months so far as opposed to at least $60 PER month before we switched. And even that was cheap...

Two thoughts I thought of were both very simple but can make a difference.

1) Make your grocery/menu lists after you've viewed this weeks sales rather than before. So if chicken is on sale think of something delicious with chicken even though you were really craving pork chops. :-)

2) Utilize your public library for everything from books and magazines to movies. We save a lot of money by not buying new releases and simply putting the things we'd like to see on hold (and being a little patient while we wait for them to come in). Sometimes we end up with DVD's that skip a lot but in the end, it's worth it to keep a little extra money in our pocket.